THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1920. A GREAT SURGEON.

Wairarapa Age, 15 October 1920, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1920. A GREAT SURGEON.

The deat'ii took place in London recently of Surgeon-General William Crawford Gorgas, of the U.S. Army. He recently arrived to confer with loading authorities preparatory to leaving for Central Africa, where he was going to conduct a mission for the stamping out of Malaria and yellow fever. Taken to Queen Alexandra's Hospital, Millbank, after a paralytic seizure, he was invested by the King with the K.C.M.G. before his death. Covered with the Stars and Stripes and borne on the shoulders of eight stalwart Guardsmen, the coffin of the American Surgeon-General W. C. Gorgas, famous for stamping out malaria and yellow fever, was taken into St. Paul's Cathedral. The Cathodral was crowded. Distinguished Englishmen and women, sailors and soldiers of high rank, and American officers were there to pay a last tribute to "pne whose life had been devoted to fighting death. The funeral service had all the elements of sombre drama about it. Met at the steps of the Cathedral by a company of fighting and medical men, the clergy and full choir, the cofiin w;us carried slowly the whole length of the lirealb uilding to its place in the chancel. The service was almost entirely choral, following a beautiful anthem by Sir John Gosh came .Mrs. AVard Howe's impressive "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Then, to the playing of Chopin's Funeral March, the coffin was carried out to the gun carriage waiting in the sunshine. It has been well said of William Crawford Gorgas. that he was a doctor who fought illness with n (Irain-pipe rather than* with drugs. Sanitation was his passion.- He gave it first place in the struggle against disease. General Gorgas owed little or nothing to chance during his wonderful career. Fortunate, pcrhaus, in his day and generation, he seized the opportunities presented by his own country's undertakings and by the unparalleled development of science during the later Victorian period. Born in Alabama (i(> years ago, he took up medicine as a career and went, through the usual stages of a young doctor's experience. Tn 1880 he became an assistant surgeon in the United States Army, and thereby took the step that not only influenced the whole of his future life, but has conferred inestimable benefits on humanity, because his Army career led him to Cuba, and Cuba meant figting yellow fever. The American Armv. with the devotion-to duty which we have learned to know 'and admire, helped his first experiments as to the transmission of yellow fever by mosquitos. Soldiers offered themselves freely for infection—they were bitten, the wore tahe clothes and slept in (lie beds of patients who had died—and in a remarkably short space of time General Gorgas was able to begin a scientific campaign which utterly wiped out the disease within twelve months. So, when the United States took over the construction of the Panama Canal, after the disastrous failure of dc Lesseps, General Gorgas tackled the anopheles mosquito and banished malaria from the canal zone, thus making it possible for the work to be doho at all. But when fame came, and he was honoured by learned institutions throughout the world, when Britain sent him to South Africa and the Rockefeller Foundation to Serbia, lie never forgot and never failed to pay the debt he owed to Sir Ronald Ross and those other Britons who discovered that malaria is conveyed to man only by the bite of the anopheles mosquito,